Iain’s colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Marlo Lewis, spoke yesterday on An Inconvenient Truth at a luncheon in Asheville, North Carolina sponsored by my organization, the John Locke Foundation. I thought this line was one of Marlo’s best:

“Al Gore says global warming is a moral issue, but I really think for him it’s a moralizing issue,” Lewis said. “It’s a way he is able to impute guilt and responsibility into the inanimate workings of nature. So if there’s anything out there you don’t like happening — like Katrina — you can blame somebody. You can hold Bush responsible for not supporting the Kyoto Protocol.”

I think this captures the essentially religious nature of much of the climate-alarmist movement. They desperately need for their apocalyptics to be accepted as truth. For some, it’s a desperate attempt to save socialism from the dust bin of history. For others, apparently including Gore, the motivation is even weirder.